We round the green bend in the river to the ocean and motorboat. We begin slowly to undress on the beach and more rapidly as the flies began biting—racing into the water and resuming conversation when the naked neck-deep critic and the naked neck-deep correspondent are deep enough so the flies can bite only our heads.
When the writer clambers into the launch, Smitty adds: “And say hello to Paul Mowrer, Hal O'Flaherty and Carroll Binder”—not realizing he has seen these Daily News powers more recently than your correspondent.
Smitty reaches the beach again and the launch's motor begins to flutter. The critic can be seen jumping into his clothes, surrounded by clouds of eager sandflies. As the boat turns for the open sea, Smitty comes down to the water's edge, cups his hands and yells something. You cup a hand to your ear. This time Smitty yells louder and points up the coast to where Lae and Salamaua and Jap-held Finschafen Head can be dimly seen.
“Land of milk and honey,” he shouts.
You raise both clenched hands in the boxer's salute.
After a cheerful wave, Smitty goes running up through the tumbled houses of the native village, dodging like a halfback as the midges pursue him.
“Here we are in New Guinea, two fellows from Chicago,” murmurs Sullivan as the little figure disappears among giant palms, “and the Japs are right over there.”
The former policeman pauses at spray from the gunwale, then adds mildly, “Sometimes I can hardly believe what is going on in this world.” Simultaneously, we begin the first gentle scratching of our emergent bites.
NATURE CONCEALS MOROBE FROM BAFFLED JAP PILOTS
With Advanced Troops in Australian-Mandated New Guinea—May 17-18, 1943
Morobe would, in one sense, be a lovely place to fight a war. It is the complete antithesis of the swamps around Buna and Sanananda, scourged with malaria, scrub typhus and hookworm. It is cool and the Japs restrict their activities to harassing raids by single or pairs of bombers, by dark. Since the coast is a small-scale Norway, with deeply-cut bays, navigable streams and involuted deep harbors, these Jap aircraft—sometimes with navigation lights temptingly aglow—cruise up and down the coast all night looking for ships and for Morobe.
It is not easy for the Japs to find the target. The coastline's indentations are all similar. In the old days, when the writer was camped in the swamps of Buna at Christmas, one could hear Jap bombers approaching the coastline often at the wrecked Jap freighter which lies on the reef at Gona. This furnished a good marker.
But Morobe is harder because dozens of coastal inlets all have islands at their mouths and from the air all the islands look alike at night. Pity the poor Jap pilot. He cannot come over by day because he may be shot down, so he comes over by night and begs pathetically for someone to fire at him and give him some guidance.
Food is coarse and pretty simple here. Most natives have been frightened away by the Japanese, who, although losing Morobe with hardly a shot fired, had a perimeter nearly two miles long beautifully concealed along the fringe of beach.
In private life Sergeant Eugene Sullivan is a Chicago policeman, but among Morobe's green hills he is recognized as the man who knows more about trailing through the jungle than anybody else. His job is silently tracking down Japs still lurking along the coast and trying to harass our communications lines. His patrols operate in some country where less than half a dozen white men have ever been before—chiefly during Germany's pre-war possession of New Guinea. It is now well known to the Americans even though it is not listed on most of the crude and disjointed maps available. Sullivan can talk pidgin as rapidly as a coconut planter, missionary or district officer of less remote districts, and so can his men. They have learned to deal with the natives with courtesy, honesty and dignity.
When you sit on the hill with the Sullivan bunch and look toward the faint shores of New Britain it seems natural enough that these Americans should become explorers in a region of unvisited vastness. The gold-bearing valleys behind Lae and Salamaua are known, but the Morobe district is not. Before the Americans it had one house, built by Germans, and deserted.
Sullivan says in his slow reasonable way: “We try to avoid trading with the natives and attempt to live on canned food. Once when we were very hungry we traded a razor blade and a can of beans for one chicken and two dozen yams, a dozen pawpaws, one watermelon, and a single stalk of about two hundred bananas.”
Sullivan's territory includes places where dogfights have occurred with Jap fighters. Searching for traces, Sullivan uses “balus,” meaning pigeon, and says to a native, “You see this fella, balusey, he walkabout on top, you come lick, lick, tell number one white fella.” Sullivan belongs to the persuasive Irish and gets results.
Living the true life of amphibian war, half the time in canoes or small boats and the rest on trails, these scouts subtly change. Frank Szczpanski, blond former machinist of Chicago, says, “When doing long patrols we generally give the native boys names of our choosing. They like it. One, who always wears a red courtship flower in his hair, we call Rose. A smart but lazy one we call Goldbrick, to remind us of his shirking without his knowing. They are often saucy, even when friendly, because they really need nothing from us and need not work if they do not wish. They call the Germans Hamburgers. One boy called me in mixed Australian and German, ‘You bloody Hamburger’ We called him Hamburger always after that.”
It rains often throughout this country. You get the same plain Army cot with single blanket and mosquito bar as has been yours in most camps for twenty-two weeks. At night everything is blacked out; it is impossible to move without a flashlight even though the walks between tents are marked with stakes and hung with connecting lawyer vines. One night soon after your arrival—flashlight left in your tent as part of your self-training to move in the dark, Jap-fashion—you blunder along the walks. Then begins twenty minutes of wandering: falling into slit trenches, stubbing toes on coconuts, jumping when another falls nearby, walking up promising sidepaths, feeling the way toe-first, then stubbing violently against the crackerbox latrine. Falling, picking yourself up, you find the tent of a surgeon who has patched the broken rim of his eyeglasses with adhesive. The nearest optician is eighty days' journey away, by the fastest connections. It is a rather lonely war.
It always rains mornings and perhaps that is why the cricket's song before dawn means only that daylight is on the way. You fold back your blanket on your bare cot and fumble for your shoes. Some officers smoke thoughtful cigarettes in bed while their minds are still warm for the preparations of the day's wet duties.
Then you get back into the same stinking jungle suit and walk along the path to the mess tent. The officer knows you carried no pack except a pencil and pad, so you get your mess kit here. Breakfast consists of one pancake and one cup of coffee.
You keep wondering why the infantry, which has everything the hardest, including food and losses, is so consistently cheerful. One officer had a single egg, obtained from a native. They passed it gingerly from hand to hand and kidded him endlessly before watching him eat it.
FOULEST SPOT IN EAST INDIES HOLDS HOPE OF
FREE HOLLAND
Somewhere in New Guinea—June 1, 1943 (Delayed)
Twenty times bombed by Japanese planes but still courageously holding on, little Merauke, mudbound rivermouth port of New Guinea's mosquito-bitten swampland, still proudly flies the red, white and blue of Queen Wilhelmina's lost Indies. Merauke alone is still unlost.
And beside Holland's lonely flag, that swamp-surrounded port flies today another red, white and blue flag, symbol of the fact that America has pledged itself to recover Holland's Indies.
Australia too, is there, with its brown, slouch-hatted Diggers, naked to the waist, laboring alongside Americans and Holland's own Javanese troops.
Uglier even than the swamps of Gona, Sanananda and Buna is this little port where exiled felons were once unloaded but which has now, by a twist of this conflict, become the residence of all Holland's hopes.
/>
To those who, like this correspondent, left part of their hearts with those brave Dutchmen of Java who stayed at their posts with the natives—stayed to shovel excrement and pull rickshaws at the command of their Jap conquerors, but stayed anyway—there is something touching about Merauke. As England was Germany's Achilles' heel, so Merauke, with its clouds of mosquitoes and fetid swamp odors, its circling white pelicans and foul beach of yellow mud, is destined to become a place which, never taken by an enemy, will be the cornerstone of recovery.
Japan is the world's second imperial power, but the answer to its aspirations is being prepared which will cut it down to measure. Like de Gaulle's Brazzaville in French Equatorial Africa, symbolically Merauke is a place of beginnings. Japan never fully conquered the Dutch Indies and now is too late for it to do so.
Jap bombers, coming probably from Babo and Fakfak—fine, readymade bases which the Allied retreat presented to the Japs eighteen months ago—have done their dirtiest to smash little Merauke. As you wander through shattered “tokos,” or native shops, it is as though you were in Soerabaya again when Japan's first bombers came over from Kendari with only a handful of outworn American P-40s opposing them.
Whether you approach Merauke by air or by sea—and so foul are the vast swamps stretching hundreds of miles back to New Guinea's mighty range that you cannot approach by land—you cannot fail to be impressed that in Merauke, freedom has chosen a strange vessel to endure in. It is as though Quasimodo should replace the Statue of Liberty.
As one passes through Torres Strait, flanked by the greenish waters around Horn and Thursday islands, and enters the Arafura Sea whose domination Jap, American and Australian airmen are still disputing, one is at the threshold of that old and cultured archipelago of Javanese influence. Yet here in Dutch New Guinea is a vast wilderness beside which Papua—no longer raw since America has poured in millions of dollars in highways and air fields—is as civilized as a downtown American city.
Dutch New Guinea's doorstep is, instead of the glittering green, blues and purples of Australian Papua's reefs, a twenty-to-thirty-mile apron of pestilential mudflats running far into the ocean. Behind them hundreds of miles of dank rivers crinkle the surface of the swamps. Trees grow in the ocean and sharks swim into swamps. You cannot tell where sea ends and land begins.
Such is Merauke, that former colony of political prisoners—unconfined and working their small land holdings—chosen as the end point of the Japanese advance southward in 1943.
Mosquitoes! This correspondent thought he had been bitten in every way a mosquito could bite until he met Merauke. Around that area of General Douglas MacArthur's four Ms (Morobe, Milne Bay, Moresby, and Merauke), there is every kind of malaria from benign, which leaves you shaky, to cerebral, which leaves you insane, and there is a mosquito to fit each. But Merauke's are something special.
When these malaria-transmitters light on your arm, they tilt their thick black bodies vertically for a straight downward dive. Instead of merely tapping you, they stab you with a deliberate, muscular thrust. They fly far out over the yellow mud waves and enter boats' portholes. Ashore it takes ten minutes with a flashlight to clean them from the inside of your hammock net before you can sleep. They patrol outside, singing in nasal fury at the appetizing odors coming from your naked, sweating body. If, stirring in sleep, you touch your elbow to the mesh of net, they cluster instantly at the opening and pebble you with stings. Droning in several tones, they go to sea with you and are still making final efforts to sting when the first cool night sea breeze sends them into drowsy death.
GUINEA'S PEACEFUL KOKODA REMINDER OF TASK AHEAD
Somewhere in New Guinea—June 18, 1943 (Delayed)
If you feel overread and overstudied on the Pacific war and have thought too long about America's future political role in the Southwest Pacific, you can go to Kokoda, if you want to see the real ground itself. Not Buna or Gona; not Sanananda or Milne Bay. Not even the empty waters off Misima Island, where thirteen months ago, in the Coral Sea battle, America's fleet first helped save Australia.
It is hard even to get to these places. You have to wait around for several days until you can get a tiny Puss Moth with a Royal Australian Air Force pilot to fly you back from Dobodura along the once Jap-held trail from Buna to the edge of the Owen Stanley Mountains. After so many hours in bombers and transports it is like riding in a baby carriage through the skies. The cloud-hung Owen Stanleys rise like a rampart behind Kokoda. Kokoda's tiny airdrome, on which Australia's fate once depended, is now quiet. Far overhead streams the endless, year-old shuttle of big American transports.
Only a few blacks are working negligently at one side. The drome is worn like an old croquet ground, because Papua's autumn is upon it, and the once-green carpet of the runway is old.
Kokoda is an important warning that our greatest battles against Japan still lie before us. Japan has been met and beaten in the Southwest Pacific, at Misma, Milne Bay, Ioraibaiwa and at Buna. It has lost much shipping, some men and considerable aircraft, but still holds the chief places of New Guinea that it seized. Tiny Kokoda, little more than a cluster of mission buildings beside a rubber plantation, with a scattering of three or four European-style houses, is the biggest place we have recaptured. It is slightly bigger than Buna and Milne Bay were before we retook them. Yet Kokoda is a reminder that we have retaken nothing much territorially. Lae and Salamaua are one task; then there are Wewak and Rabaul.
This is in New Guinea alone. The islands of the Indies, lost in one overwhelming twinkling, await us. It is humbling in a healthy sort of way to look at Kokoda, this small, white chip, the biggest we have recovered after so much brilliant and heroic fighting. Thus we can measure the magnitude of the task lying before our ground troops, whatever the setbacks dealt Japan by sea and air.
Beneath big old rubber trees, where was slain the first Australian decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross by MacArthur—Lt. Colonel William Owen, who died hurling grenades at the Japs—you can stop in meditation appropriate to this place. You are on a tongue of land about 300 yards long by 200 yards wide. Your view dominates a valley lying about 150 yards below. Down there are new white crosses, for the Australian Graves Commission is hard at work. Those bayonet-stabbed bodies from Temple-ton's Crossing are not here; they lie still in the mountains. Only one American fighter pilot, Lieutenant N. E. Brownell, who fell on November 6, lies here among his Australian comrades of all those who fought and won control of the skies above them. Many of our most gallant fliers lie unfound and unfindable in the impassable clenches of the Stanleys.
Walking along with brown-mustached Captain Alfred Watson and District Officer John Galvin, you see underfoot the leaves of these rubber trees far bigger and older than Japan's new industrialized plantations captured from the British in Malaya. There is a quiet “pop-pop” then a slight whispering—seeds falling from the trees. Life is resuming at Kokoda.
You seek out Captain Allen Champion, who with his brother Claude is among the best district officers of Papua. Allen, who is deaf, is the same slight, lithe brown man with whom you talked last August in Port Moresby at the end of the long trail across the Stanleys. It was then that he told your correspondent the first story of what happened at the Jap landing in Buna and at the first fight in Kokoda. Now he looks more rested. He has resumed work and even has a small hearing aid on his lapel, which makes it easier to talk with him.
America, recently tied up with the world-wide food conference and the problems of liberty of the press connected with it, might well look to Kokoda for a principle of treatment of rehabilitated countries. After Kokoda was reconquered, American Army transports flew dozens of loads of food there to help the Australians get native life going again. But it became apparent the natives would not work well so long as they were fed at Australo-American expense. While food itself (like wheat meal and rice) was sent, seeds for planting also were distributed. At the same time Champion and other district officers planted those ga
rdens with the same seeds, especially corn, pumpkin and banana shoots.
“When our garden is ripe and we eat from it, you should be able to do the same without depending on the government,” they told the natives.
Food relief at Kokoda now has ended and the natives' own gardens flourish.
Kokoda's natives have sharp memories of Rabaul's natives, alongside whom the Japs forced Kokoda men to carry burdens over the mountains and upon whom they spat. Contrasting the Japanese with the Australians and Americans, their summary was: “White Tabauda (master) make two boys carry one box. Jappo make one boy carry two box. If boy no carry stickum along knife.” Meaning that Jap soldiers used the bayonet as a persuader.
At Oivi—which Diggers pronounce stubbornly “Wyvee” instead of the correct “Oeevee”—the Japs felled coconuts and betel nuts, thus wiping out food and narcotic at once. They finished uprooting native life by killing pigs. (Pigs are so precious in Papua that they are always the main part of a bride's dowry.)
Having destroyed all provender, the Japs caught dogs and ate them. This upset native currency, because dogs' teeth are the coins of the Owen Stanleys just as the conch shell is for the coastal tribes.
But today the small, wild red tomatoes growing at the edge of Kokoda's rubber patch taste as sweet as though they had not been grown on bloody ground.
Seeing the greensward before the mission house, you remember bringing from Perth, in western Australia, a letter from the wife of Captain Noel Symington, who at that moment was fighting a four-day battle for this Acropolis-like plateau of Kokoda. Every night Japs crawled up over the edge of the plateau past Lt. Colonel Owen's dead body and every morning Symington's men threw them down again. One day an American Airacobra flew low and saw black-haired, twenty-five-year-old Symington waving from the split trench in which he lay flat on his back under Japanese fire. From that view came the worldwide report: “Kokoda recaptured.”
Weller's War Page 49